From Ron Dembo, advisor to leading banks and hedge funds, and Daniel Stoffman, co-author of the revolutionary bestseller Boom, Bust and Echo, Upside, Downside is an accessible guide to the biggest danger facing investors in an increasingly uncertain world: financial risk. As a generation of investors knows, financial markets are vulnerable to events – from terrorist attacks to epidemics – that are guaranteed to occur, yet impossible to predict. As markets become more complex and intertwined, investors feel increasingly unsure: how can you safeguard your financial prospects when you can’t know what the future will look like? Upside, Downside is a toolbox to protect yourself from financial risk. Co-authored by a leading financial journalist and a pioneer in the field of risk management who advises the world’s major banks, it gives investors access for the first time to the most advanced risk management strategies available, distilled into three simple rules for managing risk. These rules – Knowing What You Own, Using Multiple Scenarios, and Anticipating Regret – will allow you to take control of your financial future. You can’t banish all the dangers of the world, but Upside, Downside will give you the skills to manage them.

Quantitative methods have revolutionized the area of trading, regulation, risk management, portfolio construction, asset pricing and treasury activities, and governmental activity such as central banking to name but some of the applications. Downside-risk, as a quantitative method, is an accurate measurement of investment risk, because it captures the risk of not accomplishing the investor's goal. 'Downside Risk in Financial Markets' demonstrates how downside-risk can produce better results in performance measurement and asset allocation than variance modelling. Theory, as well as the practical issues involved in its implementation, is covered and the arguments put forward emphatically show the superiority of downside risk models to variance models in terms of risk measurement and decision making. Variance considers all uncertainty to be risky. Downside-risk only considers returns below that needed to accomplish the investor's goal, to be risky. Risk is one of the biggest issues facing the financial markets today. 'Downside Risk in Financial Markets' outlines the major issues for Investment Managers and focuses on "downside-risk" as a key activity in managing risk in investment/portfolio management. Managing risk is now THE paramount topic within the financial sector and recurring losses through the 1990s has shocked financial institutions into placing much greater emphasis on risk management and control. Free Software Enclosed To help you implement the knowledge you will gain from reading this book, a CD is enclosed that contains free software programs that were previously only available to institutional investors under special licensing agreement to The pension Research Institute. This is our contribution to the advancement of professionalism in portfolio management. The Forsey-Sortino model is an executable program that: 1. Runs on any PC without the need of any additional software. 2. Uses the bootstrap procedure developed by Dr. Bradley Effron at Stanford University to uncover what could have happened, instead of relying only on what did happen in the past. This is the best procedure we know of for describing the nature of uncertainty in financial markets. 3. Fits a three parameter lognormal distribution to the bootstrapped data to allow downside risk to be calculated from a continuous distribution. This improves the efficacy of the downside risk estimates. 4. Calculates upside potential and downside risk from monthly returns on any portfolio manager. 5. Calculates upside potential and downside risk from any user defined distribution. Forsey-Sortino Source Code: 1. The source code, written in Visual Basic 5.0, is provided for institutional investors who want to add these calculations to their existing financial services. 2. No royalties are required for this source code, providing institutions inform clients of the source of these calculations. A growing number of services are now calculating downside risk in a manner that we are not comfortable with. Therefore, we want investors to know when downside risk and upside potential are calculated in accordance with the methodology described in this book. Riddles Spreadsheet: 1. Neil Riddles, former Senior Vice President and Director of Performance Analysis at Templeton Global Advisors, now COO at Hansberger Global Advisors Inc., offers a free spreadsheet in excel format. 2. The spreadsheet calculates downside risk and upside potential relative to the returns on an index Brings together a range of relevant material, not currently available in a single volume source. Provides practical information on how financial organisations can use downside risk techniques and technological developments to effectively manage risk in their portfolio management. Provides a rigorous theoretical underpinning for the use of downside risk techniques. This is important for the long-run acceptance of the methodology, since such arguments justify consultant's recommendations to pension funds and other plan sponsors.

Quantitative models are omnipresent –but often controversially discussed– in todays risk management practice. New regulations, innovative financial products, and advances in valuation techniques provide a continuous flow of challenging problems for financial engineers and risk managers alike. Designing a sound stochastic model requires finding a careful balance between parsimonious model assumptions, mathematical viability, and interpretability of the output. Moreover, data requirements and the end-user training are to be considered as well. The KPMG Center of Excellence in Risk Management conference Risk Management Reloaded and this proceedings volume contribute to bridging the gap between academia –providing methodological advances– and practice –having a firm understanding of the economic conditions in which a given model is used. Discussed fields of application range from asset management, credit risk, and energy to risk management issues in insurance. Methodologically, dependence modeling, multiple-curve interest rate-models, and model risk are addressed. Finally, regulatory developments and possible limits of mathematical modeling are discussed.

The prediction of the valuation of the “quality” of firm accounting disclosure is an emerging economic problem that has not been adequately analyzed in the relevant economic literature. While there are a plethora of machine learning methods and algorithms that have been implemented in recent years in the field of economics that aim at creating predictive models for detecting business failure, only a small amount of literature is provided towards the prediction of the “actual” financial performance of the business activity. Machine Learning Applications for Accounting Disclosure and Fraud Detection is a crucial reference work that uses machine learning techniques in accounting disclosure and identifies methodological aspects revealing the deployment of fraudulent behavior and fraud detection in the corporate environment. The book applies machine learning models to identify “quality” characteristics in corporate accounting disclosure, proposing specific tools for detecting core business fraud characteristics. Covering topics that include data mining; fraud governance, detection, and prevention; and internal auditing, this book is essential for accountants, auditors, managers, fraud detection experts, forensic accountants, financial accountants, IT specialists, corporate finance experts, business analysts, academicians, researchers, and students.

Key coverage/key issues of this book are: uncertainty and its mitigation, upside risk, the disadvantages of using optimum bias alone, evidence that has recently emerged about the risks in transport infrastructure projects, and risk efficiency.

Now in its third edition, Fundamentals of Risk Management provides a comprehensive introduction to commercial and business risk for anyone studying for a career in risk as well as for a broad range of risk professionals in different sectors. Providing extensive coverage of the core concepts and frameworks of business continuity planning, enterprise risk management and project risk management, with an increased focus on risk in international markets, this is the definitive guide to dealing with the different types of risk an organization faces. With relevant international case studies and examples from both the private and public sectors, this third edition of Fundamentals of Risk Management is completely aligned to ISO 31000. Including a thorough overview of the international risk standards and frameworks, it explores the different types of risk an organization faces, including hazard risks and uncertainties. This new edition includes an extended section with best-practice advice on analysing your organization's risk appetite and successfully implementing a company-wide strategy on risk, reinforced by enhanced resilience. Endorsed by the IRM and the core text for their International Certificate in Risk Management qualification, Fundamentals of Risk Management is the definitive professional text for risk managers.